Category: Four pillars

Four Pillars: EAI and DRM

Imagine this. Imagine you are part of a household of three people, living in the same house. Make it simpler, assume you are related by blood and marriage (or its civil equivalent). You have a bunch of 33rpm vinyl albums, some cassette tapes, some videotapes and quite a few CDs and DVDs. Maybe some lacquer 78s as well, and a host of 45rpm singles.

Imagine you have paid the new market price for all those things. In effect, you have done your bit to meet the business expectations of all those people involved in writing, publishing, recording, manufacturing, marketing and distrubuting all those things. You have never allowed anyone else to make a copy of those things; you may have burned the odd CD for parties or for the car, but that’s all.

Everyone’s happy.

Now to play all this you have all the necessary gadgets as well. Which you have also paid the ruling market price for. You have a Victrola, a turntable, a cassette tape player, a videotape player, a CD player, a DVD player and a gazillion iPods. And maybe some MP3 players, half a gazillion computers and something that aspires to be Sky+ or Tivo.

With the advance of technology, you can now digitise all this and make it available to yourself to watch or listen to wherever you like. Any room at home, and even while on the road.

And someone stops you. Stops you from watching or listening to the things you’ve already paid full market price for, using the devices you’ve already paid full market price for, stops you spending your own time and money converting all these different formats into one elegant whole. Stops you despite your having ponied up at every stage already. Stops you despite the investment you made in getting broadband and ethernet and broadband wireless and Airport and whatever else you may have acquired.

And calls it customer choice, somehow insinuates at the same time that you’re stealing money from the artists you already paid by doing anything with the stuff you paid for.

I guess you’d get slightly irritated. And rail at Apple or Microsoft or Sony or Hollywood or everyone else involved in this mess. And then meekly put up with it.

Is that harsh? Calling us meek? I don’t think so.

Why ever not? Today, that’s how it feels to me when I look at information in any organisation. First we pay for creating it or acquiring it, but it stays with the “devices” that are lock-stepped with the “content”. Our devices. Our content. Then we pay for a whole pile of EAI and “middleware”, to try and release from lock-in what we have paid for at least once already, probably much more than that. Then we pay for making this humongous beast “secure”, and in the process ensure that we spend even more money trying to extricate from our own dungeons what is ours in the first place. And, just in case we feel we haven’t spend enough money on this, we start introducing more and more DRM, which makes a fine art of data/device lock-in.

We do this meekly today. And the enterprise IT equivalent of napster and downloads and kazaa and everything else is called opensource. Commoditised future-proof bug-free scaleable attractively-priced infrastructure. Infrastructure which has created an ecosystem that allows us to move our information around without EAI and “data mining” and “business intelligence suites” and whatnot.

[An aside. Think about who pays to bury in six foot of concrete that which you later “mine”. Think about who gets the gold that you mine.]

The truth is, it has taken time for us to be able to work on a common infrastructure with market-driven standards and the possibility of operating without device or other lock-in, and EAI was an opportunity for people to make money while we got there.

But surely not now. Not now when we don’t have to. Not now we have the technology.

Yet we put up with it in every enterprise.

Generation M is round the corner. They perceive value differently, they perceive time differently, they perceive many things differently.

And they’re not going to put up with it. EAI or DRM. They’re not going to put up with paying premium money to do things that are fundamentally closer to deckchairs and Titanics and arrangements than anything else. That’s why Napster and Gnutella and Kazaa and Skype and BitTorrent. That’s why Linux. [Another aside. With all the supergazillions spent on R&D in the technology and telecoms space, just how many of these things came from incumbents? Why? I wonder. Clayton Christenson come back all is forgiven.]
We don’t have to do anything. But if we believe that people are our most important asset, if we believe that the social cost of implementing systems is a magnitude greater than the physical cost, if we believe that we have gained anything at all from Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder, if we believe there is a war for talent, and if we believe that the best business strategies begin with “First Get Good People”, then we may have to do something.

Because competition for Generation M is just one layer of DRMlessness away. One layer of EAIlessness away.

Think about it. What these things represent is equivalent to your being told your ability to drive on a particular road should be tied to the age of the road and the age of the vehicle….

Just a thought.

Four Pillars: Further musings on trust

As recommended by Coding The Markets, I ordered Larry Harris’s Trading and Exchanges; and as recommended by Martin Geddes, I ordered Adam Seligman’s The Problem of Trust.

I’ve now received both books, and I’m working my way through them. Thanks again to both.

A few quick observations:

1. When I looked at Harris’s definitions of trustworthiness and creditworthiness, I was more intrigued by the sentences that followed the definitions than by the definitions themselves. I quote:

People are trustworthy if they try to do what they say they will do. People are creditworthy if they can do what they say they will do.

[So far so good, but here comes a snowball designed for me].

Since people often will not or cannot do what they promise, market institutions must be designed to effectively and inexpensively enforce contracts.

End of quote.

Wow.

Before commenting, I’d like to recount a tangential tale from Seligman’s book. In his conclusions, as an aside Seligman discusses his changing behaviour with respect to smoking. When it was legal for him to smoke anywhere, he was always courteous and asked people around him whether they minded. Once someone else (e.g. “the state”) decided where he could smoke and where he couldn’t, his behaviour changed. Now he no longer asked for permission. If he was legally entitled to smoke somewhere he did.

I think the two stories are linked, and are all about covenant-versus-contract behaviour. In a covenant, when you hit a problem, you try and fix it. In a contract, when the same thing happens, you look for recourse. Someone to blame. Someone to sue. Someone to pay. Anyone. But not you.

And in a weird kind of way it’s linked to all the stuff we learnt about Quality First. If you remove responsibility and accountability from an actor, then you do not get quality. Instead you get output that is explicitly designed to keep the relevant  Inspection Department fully occupied. Why complain? Surely that’s the reason you set the department up in the first place. Inspectors inspect. That’s what they do.

As a complete aside I am reminded of the work done by Erik Brynjolfsson et al on Incomplete Contracts, some of which you can read here. I quote from Erik’s paper:

….unlike the contracts typically analyzed by agency theory, real world contracts are almost always “incomplete”, in the sense that there are inevitably some circumstances or contingencies that are left out of the contract, because they were either unforeseen or simply too expensive to enumerate in sufficient detail.

Random walk over. What am I trying to say? 

Larry Harris seems to be saying that people often don’t do what they say they will do, and that market structures have to take this into account. In fact he goes further and says “Attempts to solve trustworthiness and creditworthiness problems explain much of the structure of market institutions.” And he sees contract enforceability as the way to solve it.

Adam Seligman seems to be saying that people behave differently when they no longer need to negotiate bilateral or multilateral agreements on what is mutually acceptable, especially driven by nanny- behaviour, be it state or regulator or firm. Here the enforceability of the contract (“I can smoke here but not there”) creates undesired outcomes.

Erik Brynjolfsson seems to be saying that real world contracts are incomplete anyway.

Which leaves me thinking. Just what is it we are trying to do with trust? Why are we mixing it up with contract when it is patently not contract? It seems strange to design for failure in a market, talking about trusting people but expecting them to fail; it seems strange to talk about using contracts to enforce what happens in failure when most contracts are incomplete and probably expensive to enforce; it seems strange to empower people by increasing inspection that reduces their accountability.

The costs of this set-up-to-fail design couldn’t be low. It’s a bit like planning for pilferage in supermarkets, something else that makes less than perfect sense to me. There seems to be a lot of scope to revisit what we think about trust. I will continue to read Harris and Seligman and continue to have conversations with people, because it looks as if there may be scope to think differently. I remain grateful for the pointers, so please keep them coming.

An aside. Opensource communities work on the all-bugs-are-shallow-to-many eyes principle. How come this improves quality rather than decreases it? Two reasons. One, there is no implied de-skilling of the knowledge worker, in fact peer recognition issues have the opposite effect, people want to exhibit quality work. Two, the inspectors are not a class apart, but themselves developers. Development and inspection are interchangeable roles, interchangeable within the day.

If you design for inspectors to find faults you will have faults. If you design for Post Closing Adjustments to financial figures you will have Post Closing Adjustments. If you design for Second Chances at auctions you will have Second Chances. If you design for market participants to fail then some will fail.

Alternatively you could have covenant, and the occasional ruptured bench. I must check just how many benches the merchants of Lombardy broke.

Just a thought. More later.

Link spam

For the last week or so, I’ve noticed that I get the odd site linking to me that has nothing at all to do with the subject or tone of my blog. I guess link-spamming has been happening for a while and I’ve just been lucky so far.

Since I don’t actually display those that link to me, it probably doesn’t matter; on the other hand, it means that things like technorati rankings become less valuable as a result (unless technorati have some means of discounting such stuff).

I realise that any attempt to constrain or muzzle linking goes against the heart of what the internet is about: we should always ensure that anyone can set up a site and then link to other sites.

So I’m not looking for a solution to the problem; I’m just wondering whether this is common or whether we are seeing something new. My hunch is that link-spamming is more expensive than e-mail or comment spamming, since there has to be a site and a host; my hope is that these sites are fly-by-night and disappear as quickly as they arrive; I’d love to know what others think.

Four Pillars: Venezuela: One way to get people to think Opensource

I’m trying to get more information, but this story got my attention this morning.

I quote from the press release:

A program to train over 400 thousand people in open source software – as part of Mission Science – will start on Monday, June 12 in Venezuela. This training program will be carried out by the National Center of Information Technologies (CNTI, Spanish acronym). CNTI’s President, Jorge Berrizbeitia, explained that the first goal is to train the population that does not know anything about this field.

The registration process will be carried out in the 330 information offices distributed all around the country.

These free courses will last 24 hours. They will be completed according to the needs of each community. They include hardware and software fundamentals, their use and utilities, and the importance of information and communication technologies for communities.

Berrizbieta pointed out that 860 people will participate as teachers in these courses.

The CNTI’s head stated that the second stage of this program will train over 300 thousand reservists on this technology-information matter. He also added that the CNTI plans to open other 230 information offices. This institution also will provide mobile information offices that will be able to reach low-income communities of difficult access.

I’ve never come across any government doing this on a scale that is comparable. Training 400,000 people in the concepts and use of opensource software. With over 800 teachers. On a national scale. Specifically targeting low-income communities with poor access.

I have not looked at the curriculum or syllabus; I am not aware of how this is being funded; and it is difficult for me to tell how effective one day’s training will be.

But I applaud the move. I will definitely be tracking how they are doing. If anyone else is interested, please let me know via a comment.

Does anyone know of any other country where this is being attempted on such a scale?

Or, for that matter, any other organisation, public or private?

Four Pillars: Scoble moves on, and more musings on access

RageBoy brought this story to my attention, so hello and thanks to Boulder from Calcutta. Or Windsor, if you prefer.

The story itself was simple: Microsoft had done a deal with a couple of major universities to scan, and make available to all, a vast collection of out-of-copyright material. Given that the universities mentioned were the University of California and the University of Toronto, this could be a major deal. So I started investigating whatever I could find out.

And, almost in passing, I saw the Scoble story, which you can find here, with his comments here. Whatever opinions you may have about Robert Scoble, one thing is not in doubt. He helped change public opinion about Microsoft. Yes there are others: Kim Cameron and Ray Ozzie come immediately to mind, but the Scobleizer was the first to break ranks. In the early days of his blog, I must confess there wasn’t a day when I didn’t say to myself “Go get ’em Floyd” as I read his posts. So thanks and good luck to him, and to PodTech.net, the start-up he’s joining.

Back to the library cards story. It’s a difficult one for me to work out, because we’ve got denials and arguments even before we have clarity on exactly what’s been announced. So I’m going to write on the principles.

A vendor scans a whole pile of out-of-copyright materials and makes them available to the public. Fantastic. This could not have happened unless the “beneficial owner” of those out-of-copyright materials gave permission in the first place. Also fantastic.

What happens next? If someone else does a Google Book Search or an Amazon Look Inside or whatever else they call it, this is good. It’s called competition, should improve quality and reduce cost and make everything more accessible to more people.

So the next things to look at are access and cost. And on the surface everything is copacetic. Works with any browser. No digital walls to be seen anywhere. No implied or explicit costs.

Assuming these things don’t change, and we’re not witnessing some sort of freebie-hook-with-your-life-on-the-other-end-of-the-line, what else do I worry about? Simple. I need to understand the lock-in that doesn’t affect me today, but that will definitely affect me tomorrow.

A silo high-coupling between the browser/portal and the information. I expect to see a world where I can’t get to Google Book search output except via Google, Amazon Look Inside output except via Amazon and Windows Whatever except via Windows.

Today I can use Google to give me Amazon hits.

Tomorrow I need to be able to use Google and Firefox on a linux machine to give me Microsoft-Indexed-Books-Out-Of-Copyright-from-University-of-California. I don’t care how I get to the book, whether I have to click on a Google result to go to a Microsoft site to get it, or other means.

What matters to me is:

(a) no constraint on the browser or OS initiating the search request

(b) no constraint on the search engine initiating the search

(c) no need to provide any further login or identity credentials to get to the material

I am quite willing to credit the donor (University of California, if the story is true) and the scanner/indexer (Microsoft) whenever I use the material, but I want this process simplified as well.

So I look forward to finding out more. My gut feel is less charitable than I sound, even though I’ve tried to read this url on a Mac with Firefox and everything seemed to work.

So I will mull over leopards and spots.